Black beans, Quinoa, and Chick Peas - what do I do with them?

I am a university student who has gotten into the bad habit of living off of Tim Hortons and other fast food - but this past weekend my parents came up to see me and brought a bunch of groceries. Among these were several tins of chick peas, black beans, and a big pack of quinoa. I know these are all affordable and very nutritious, but I just don't know what to do with them! I am trying to transition to homemade foods that are made from cheap, healthy ingredients (rice, quinoa, beans, chick peas, etc...) but I just don't know what to do - my cooking experience is limited to frying rice and eggs.

I tried google searches but I find them not very helpful. Instead of just copying exact recipes I prefer to get an understanding of each ingredient so I can come up with my own stuff. If any of the experts here have advice on how these can be incorporated into my diet I would love to know. Based on how cheap and nutritious these things are I could probably make a big batch of something tasty that could last a week for very little.

With the chickpeas, make hummus! Or you could make a simple salad with chickpeas, garlic and cumin, oil and vinegar.

Quinoa is a grain so it can be used pretty much like you would rice. Or one of my favorites: Quinoa cakes (google it for recipes).

Black beans are delicious. Just cook them thoroughly, then render some bits of bacon, and refry the beans in the lard with the bacon, smashing them with the back of a spoon: refried beans! Serve with rice, or with tacos, burritos, enchiladas, tomato/onion salsa, guacamole etc.... ;)

I would cook the quinoa and black beans up in separate batches. Both are very easy to make, and can be very tasty on their own. You can add either to a sauté pan and with the quinoa add some fresh sliced vegetables for dinner.
Both quinoa and black beans are very high in protein. As for the chickpeas the obvious choice would be to make hummus which is also great with fresh vegetables or bread.
What drew me to this post is when my calorie intake was up while trying to put on mass while weight training, this basically was my diet. Fried eggs and black beans for breakfast, hummus and veggies for lunch, an different preparations of quinoa for dinner. Ate almost entirely that, you'd swear I was jamming roids.

I like black beans tossed in salads. They also make a great soup. You'll find plenty of recipes for that. I also like to make a rice salad with cooked and cooled rice, diced bell peppers, black beans, scallion, celery, herbs and dressed with a cumin vinegraitte.

You attend a university, have access to web and you are looking for ideas and recipes????

Yes, and THIS website is one of the sources on the web. I don;t understand, Ed, why don;t you like people asking for recipes? Isn't this what this website is about? You're not obliged to answer them.

Chick peas make great full protein, very filling and satisfying one course meal. Are they canned or dried? If dried you have to soak them in water overnight or they;ll never cook. The package might say how long to cook them once you've soaked them, but i think an hour. (If they;re canned, add to the soup below and you can cook it only 10-20 minutes)

Get some onion, celery and carrot (one of each) and a couple of garlic cloves - chop them up and fry slowly in a little oil in a pot. Don't let them brown. Add the soaked chick peas with enough water to cover them and about an inch more or just add canned chick peas and water to the same level and cook till tender (canned just need to be cooked to pick up the flavor)

Remove a cup or so of the cooked chickpeas. Puree the rest. Put the whole chickpeas back in the soup. Cook some short fat pasta (ditali, small shells, elbows, whatever is bite sized) in lots of water and a handful of salt and when there is just a little line of white when you bite into one, drain and add to the soup. Cook another minute or two.

or make a quinoa salad - boil the quinoa about 7 - 8 minutes, just so they;re not crunchy but not till they;re mushy. Add beans, chick peas, peas, tomatoes, celery, olive oil, and lots of lemon juice. Nice combination of flavors and textures.

"Siduri said, 'Gilgamesh, where are you roaming? You will never find the eternal life that you seek...Savour your food, make each of your days a delight, ... let music and dancing fill your house, love the child who holds you by the hand and give your wife pleasure in your embrace.'"

"Siduri said, 'Gilgamesh, where are you roaming? You will never find the eternal life that you seek...Savour your food, make each of your days a delight, ... let music and dancing fill your house, love the child who holds you by the hand and give your wife pleasure in your embrace.'"

Wrong I do like people looking for recipes,but I don't like people looking for everyome else to do the leg work for them. Example being students who come on here and ask for help for a class. The instructor has given them an assighnment to research and carry out NOT YOU . If they don;t look it up and do research on the project then the instructor was better off not giving it at all. The only correct way to learn is to do. Look at your answer as far as telling protein content, time of cooking. Do you think they would learn any tech facts about what they were doing without reading and trying? I think not. Are they aware they can make salads from these products? I don;t know about other countries but do know that reading about a subject,researching it used to be the best way to approach it, Unfortuantly in the US we have gotten away from reading therefore look where we rank today in education in comparison to years ago. I can tell you we have not gone up or even stayed ebreast of what we once were. Just to watch Jay Leno when he interviews average citizens on the street Is scary, and these are real answers given to rel questions. I oft wondered why all the bells and whistles go off in McDonalds ? they were smart their is no room for guesng the product is done and bell goes off Thank God. the idiotcy of society created these fail safe solutions. Sorry this is my opinion.

Well, Ed, for me doing an internet search for a recipe is always a hit or miss, and mostly miss kind of thing. There are infinite recipes out there, and most untested, and posted by people i don't know. And not all people can really afford to buy a bunch of good cookbooks.

And there is something that I consider important in education, not only in learning to cook but any learning, that is the interpersonal relationship between the person with more knowledge and understanding and the one with less. The relationship is what makes learning significant and which gives a sense to it all. It's the possibility of an exchange and not just a random answer. It's becoming a part of a community of something - whether cooks or historians or whatever.

So say someone is supposed to invent a recipe for a course and asks here what to do with A, B and C and gets an answer, maybe disguising themselves as an amateur beginner, well, it's their loss if they don't try to figure it out themselves. But actually, in asking here, they establish a relationship which can be give and take - asking questions, why this, and what if i did this, and has anyone ever tried the other? this is all the essence of learning, with people who can teach and people interested in learning. And not all culinary school (or university or high school) teachers really know about how to teach or even care. Their idea of teaching is to show how smart they are and how stupid their students are.

And then, say it really is a student who has never cooked before and has to nourish himself with something healthy, and he got a care package of legumes and grains and has no idea what to do with them, then even more so i really want to help him. I want him to get my experience and my knowledge and understanding of cooking, to make it be a good experience so he won't throw in the towel and resort once more to crappy takeout junk. Isn't this the purpose of this site? get people to cook.

And yeah, he can look up black beans and find thousands of recipes, and how does he know what they taste like anyway, and how hard they may really be?

"Siduri said, 'Gilgamesh, where are you roaming? You will never find the eternal life that you seek...Savour your food, make each of your days a delight, ... let music and dancing fill your house, love the child who holds you by the hand and give your wife pleasure in your embrace.'"

"Siduri said, 'Gilgamesh, where are you roaming? You will never find the eternal life that you seek...Savour your food, make each of your days a delight, ... let music and dancing fill your house, love the child who holds you by the hand and give your wife pleasure in your embrace.'"

Oh my those are all very appealing, I am going to start tackling them in order of how hard they seem. Thanks so much for the responses, my girlfriend is a vegetarian so I bet I can impress her with some nice veggie-friendly protein dishes!

I'll help with chic peas..garbanzo beans in some recipes...I assume they are canned...ready to go. I love to saute onions, garlic, ginger, till soft...add the strained chic peas, your favorite curry, yellow works well, and a tin of coconut milk. let this simmer...until the sauce is thickened a bit. this is a great base to add chicken to...or zucchini and bell peppers...if a veg option is preferred. hope that helps. James

books are free in the library. I taught school for 7 years and took many different teaching courses. All state the same (let the student find and figure out the answer is the correct way to learn and learn it well. You can help or give a clue but let them do it, after all when down the road they have to do it n theier own ,you are not standing there to help.

books are free in the library. I taught school for 7 years and took many different teaching courses. All state the same (let the student find and figure out the answer is the correct way to learn and learn it well. You can help or give a clue but let them do it, after all when down the road they have to do it n theier own ,you are not standing there to help.

Oh Ed, what's it to ya really? I've been a teacher for a much longer time myself (not of cooking) so I can safely say that a teacher's role is to impress, inspire, nurture, sympathize, lead, and instruct. Can you say you've exhibited any of these? If the OP had walked into your class the first day of school and was met with such scorn I'd be willing to bet he'd request a transfer. You are truly not obligated to provide any free information, or free recipes to anyone on the board. And you are not appointed as cheftalk's "greeter to new members" so really, attacking people who ask for help does not behoove someone's status of Culinary Instructor. You know what they say, if you don't have anything nice to say....

Ed: I really don;t see what's bad about getting information from a person rather than a book. The book, after all, was written by a person, wasn't it? And the difference is that the person can clear up any questions the student has, while the book can't

Don't we also learn from parents, mentors, teachers? Don't mothers or fathers give kids their recipes? why not strangers? and why bother to be on a forum if you don't want to answer questions and ask them? Isn't that the best knowledge after all, one tied to a relationship of encouragement and learning.

But anyway

Brendon, there are lots of vegetarian recipes around and if you have some ingredients just ask.

"Siduri said, 'Gilgamesh, where are you roaming? You will never find the eternal life that you seek...Savour your food, make each of your days a delight, ... let music and dancing fill your house, love the child who holds you by the hand and give your wife pleasure in your embrace.'"

"Siduri said, 'Gilgamesh, where are you roaming? You will never find the eternal life that you seek...Savour your food, make each of your days a delight, ... let music and dancing fill your house, love the child who holds you by the hand and give your wife pleasure in your embrace.'"

I've had the most fun with recipe's when I try to stay a 'fresh' as possible, plus 'fresh' is more often cheaper! So, I'd look around online for some simple recipes using one of your ingredients above, and read a few different recipes, THAN, I'd change out every none fresh item I could. Canned beans aren't bad, but when you include fresh items, it makes them better. For instance, I recently make a black bean soup which called for a Louisianna hot sauce, so what I did was substitute the hot sauce for a nice chopped red chilli, and loved the result (recipe also called for dried tomatoes, onions, green pepper, and more). Of course, I had to add some other things as well besides the pepper, but was glad I did. So, my idea is to find fresh additions to your canned items. Going in this direction has been rewarding to my health, rewarding to my budget, and rewarding to my taste buds!

I found an AWESOME recipe by typing in "Mexican Quinoa". It has black beans in it and I'm doing it again tonight with everything in the recipe and adding chick peas, also.

Also, I keep yellow and red curry paste here as a staple ingredient. I'm going to try that with Inca Red Quinoa and the chick peas and black beans. We are meat eaters and are trying to go most days without it. The outrageous protein in quinoa is a great substitute.

Try different things. If the quinoa says to rinse it a few times, do it. Otherwise, it will be bitter. Good luck!

One of my favorite things to do with quinoa is to mix it with a little butter and citrus juice with herbs or other ingredients.

For example, cook your quinoa with vegetable stock, a little salt and minced garlic. You can mix this with fresh lemon juice, butter and parsley. You can also mix it with lime juice, cilantro and butter. Orange juice, butter and fresh thyme. Tomato juice, butter and chopped fresh tomatoes. Lemon juice, butter and dill.

You can add other ingredients during the "boiling" faze too, like chopped onions, frozen peas or spices like cumin.

You can also chop vegetables and sauté them until soft, then add your quinoa and broth then cook until the quinoa is done.

One KEY to making good quinoa is not to over cook it. The directions on quinoa, rice and other grains, often call for too much liquid. If you have an electric stove with one burner that has a really low setting, you'll get the best quinoa by using 1.5 parts liquid to 1 part quinoa, boiling the liquid first then stirring in the quinoa, covering, and reducing the heat to its lowest setting. If you have a gas stove or don't have a really low burner on an electric stove, you'll probably have to use 2 parts liquid to 1 part quinoa. I never use more that 2 to 1 no matter what the direction say.